


Not Toulouse

by Roadstergal



Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Bicycles, Coffee, Gen, M/M, Paris (City), San Francisco, Sexual Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-02
Updated: 2012-05-02
Packaged: 2017-11-04 16:45:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/396002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadstergal/pseuds/Roadstergal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Surely this would be the easiest bet Martin ever had!  But nothing is ever straightforward where Douglas is concerned.</p><p>Written for Queer Fest 2012.  Prompt: "Douglas Richardson: he likes to keep people guessing about his sexuality. No, quite literally; there's a prize."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Toulouse

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to my beta Kahvi!

"Guess."

"Oh, go for it, skip! This should be an easy one!"

Martin sat back in his seat. He was wary, now, of 'easy ones' where Douglas was concerned. Even ones where it seemed he should have a 50/50 shot, and where one of those fiftys seemed to be eliminated.

It was all the fault of the gay pride parade, really.

Arthur had been terribly excited about it, and had asked Carolyn if they could stay one more day in San Francisco before returning to Hawaii.

"No, we cannot. Mr. Alyahkin is paying us to take some very wealthy people from their day jobs YouBooking, or FaceTubing, or whatever it is they do, out to Hawaii to sell them yachts. He is not paying you to ogle scantily clad muscular men, or scantily clad muscular women, or whatever it was you were planning on ogling at the Pride Parade."

"Oh, I wasn't going to ogle, promise! I just wanted to see the spectacle. All those feathers!"

"You do realize, of course," Douglas interjected, pointing his chopsticks at Arthur, "that there will be opportunities to watch men dressed in feathers dancing around at our stop-off in Waikiki?"

"Yeah, but... they won't be gay! Or maybe they will, but it won't be the reason they're out there and dressed in feathers!"

"I'm missing something, I believe." Douglas poked at his sushi. "A quality meal, for one."

"You wanted sushi, I needed affordability." Carolyn's gesture took in the three other tables, the dilapidated bar, and the bored server watching television in the corner. "Voila."

"I'm not sure of they killed the eel, or if it just lost the will to live," Douglas sighed, picking up a roll.

"It was this or the Subway next door."

"I'll save that for when _I've_ lost the will to live."

"It's all right," Martin told Arthur. "There will be other parades. There's one in London, you know. You can take the Tube in to see it."

"I'm surprised you know of it, Martin," Douglas commented, "considering it consists of two things you're not terribly familiar with - gaitey, and pride."

* * *

"I am, you know."

Douglas sat back in the co-pilot's seat. "That was either profoundly philosophical, or a reference to a conversation so unimportant that I've forgotten it already."

"Proud." Martin looked for something he could legitimately fiddle with, just to give his hands something to do. Gertie was flying straight and smooth on autopilot, and Martin was loath to change that situation. He settled for hooking his fingers in his chest straps. "I have pride."

"Oh, that's great to hear!" The cockpit door slammed open as Arthur barged through it with the cheese tray. "Are you gay, then?"

"Am I... no... no, of course not, I'm not gay!" Martin protested. He liked women, didn't he? Not all of them, of course, but a certain subset, and surely liking even just one of them sufficed. "You can be proud about other things!"

"Really?" Douglas took the squidgy cheese from the tray while it was still too high for Martin to reach. "What exactly _are_ you proud of?"

"I'm the captain of this airplane," Martin said, with conviction, snatching the brie quickly as Arthur set the tray down between them. "That is _indeed_ something to be proud of."

Douglas looked around the shabby flight deck, pointedly. "You might want to take up sleeping with men, if that's the best you can come up with."

"I'm not gay, ergo, I don't sleep with men." Of course, Martin didn't sleep with anybody, but that was hardly germane to the conversation, all in all.

"Oh, is that all there is to it?" Arthur asked, curiously.

"Beg pardon?" This conversation was starting to get away from Martin, in a sickening familiar fashion.

"Well, I thought being gay was all about brilliant parades and little swimsuits and loud music. It's about sleeping with men?" The wheels in Arthur's brain were almost visibly spinning. "So when mum only gets us one room, are we gay?"

"Ah, I knew we were doing a disservice to sex when we described it as 'sleeping,'" Douglas noted.

"Oh! It's about _sex_!" Arthur beamed. "That makes _so_ much more sense!"

"Well, perhaps not _all_ about sex. We used to have a little game at British Airways - 'Guess the sexual orientation.' I was extremely good at it."

"It must have been easy for your competitors." Martin reached for the Roquefort, but Douglas's hand moved with startling rapidity, and Martin had to settle for the sad little Laughing Cow wheel.

"Was it? Well, then, it must be simplicity itself for a proud man of _your_ insight. Go on, guess - if you're right, you'll get a prize."

"And if I'm wrong?" This was too good to be true. Martin cared not one whit what the prize might be - he wanted to _win_ , for once. This was surely a slam-dunk.

"I get one forfeit of my choosing, at the time of my choosing. So? Guess."

"Oh, go for it, skip! This should be an easy one!"

This was the point at which Martin's self-defense mechanism kicked in - if the sure knowledge that one would never win, and certainly not that easily, could be considered a defense mechanism. Fortunately, he was rescued by the appearance of Carolyn. "Good afternoon, gentlemen," she said as she breezed in. "Could anyone tell me where we are supposed to be landing today?"

"Paris," Martin said, shortly.

"And could anyone tell me what that large black metal structure off to the left is?"

"It's the..." Martin swallowed. "Ah. We'll prepare for landing, then?"

"Oh, would you?" Carolyn sighed. "We need to get those professional bicyclists off of this plane before they bankrupt us from the food budget alone. I don't know they can eat that much and still look like a stiff breeze could take them all away."

Between the landing and the kerfuffle with Customs over the pile of bicycle cases and sacks of strangely engineered foodstuffs, Douglas's challenge was pushed away for the time being. Yet it stuck in the back of Martin's mind. _Where was the catch?_

* * *

Martin left the hotel shortly after checking in. He would be inclined to, anyway, given that his room had no windows and some disturbing scratching sounds in the corner, but this time - he had a _mission_.

It took some missed connections and doubling-back a time or two on the trains, but Martin found his way to a public library. The lovely, dark-haired librarian at the desk spoke excellent English, which was a good thing, as she informed him that his carefully memorized French "Could you help me with some research?" actually translated better to "Could you eat my carry-on?"

She directed him to the computer bay, showed him how to switch the display language to English, politely asked him to refrain from masturbating, and left him to his work.

Martin buckled down to his task. Douglas had been married, Douglas had children, ergo, Douglas had sex with women and Douglas was straight - it seemed simple enough. Yet this was _Douglas_. There _had_ to be a catch, and Martin was determind to sniff it out. Were there ever occurrences when a man would have sex with a woman and _not_ be straight?

When Martin was young, he had been required, in the way boys of his age are, to play football. He sat on the bench a great deal of the time, which suited him perfectly well. However, ten games into the season, a particularly injury-plagued Christmas break had left the team short several key players, and Martin had reluctantly been sent out to play - a reluctance shared by all involved. The memory was still visceral; even at that age, he had been smaller than most boys, and between the massive boys with legs like tree-trunks around him, the seemingly infinite spread of the pitch, and the Byzantine complexity of the rules, Martin felt a profound sense of his own limitations, and a world out there laughably far beyond his ability to comprehend or to deal with.

That same feeling came back to him as he looked through pages of information on human sexuality. The simple, easily understandable dichotomy of 'gay' and 'straight' slipped away as he read about bisexuality, pansexuality, omnisexuality, asexuality, about transgenders, pangenders, transsexuals, about sexual aversion and hypersexuality...

With each description, Martin started to hold his own experience up against it. As he had the first time he looked through a medical textbook, he could turn and twist his own symptoms just enough to slot himself into most of the diagnostic categories. Liking women, yes, not comfortable in established gender categories, yes, attracted to some aspects of men, yes, attracted to... he opened a picture of Andrej Pejic, and his jaw dropped. That was _not_ fair.

The lovely librarian touched his shoulder and murmured that the library would soon be closed, then walked off to find the remaining stragglers in the stacks. Martin watched her walk away, her rear end tempting in its dark and sober, yet tight, skirt. Was _she_ truly a female? This was a dangerous Pandora's box he had opened, wasn't it! He closed down his browser windows and left the library, his head spinning. There was nothing simple about this challenge of Douglas's, nothing at all. So many labels, so many categories, so much classification! Good god, Martin no longer knew where to put _himself_!

* * *

"You're quiet this morning," Douglas noted as he leveled off the airplane to cruising altitude.

"I haven't had my coffee," Martin protested, shifting in his seat. Various sexualities and gender identities continued to buzz around his head - frustrating, complicated, senseless.

"I don't blame you." Douglas picked up his own coffee and sniffed it distastefully. "I have no idea..."

"Hey, chaps!" Arthur trotted onto the flight deck. "How's the coffee this morning?"

"It's like nothing I've ever tasted," Douglas replied. "What did you put in it?"

"Just milk and two lumps, for you. But I made it with a different recipe today. You see, we're all out of bottled water; mum said we had to recover from those cyclists a bit before buying more. So I made it with some of that blue water."

"Blue water?" Martin asked, baffled.

"From the _loo_?" Douglas asked.

"Absolutely! Don't worry, it's all clean. I flushed twice before collecting it."

"Very considerate," Douglas murmured, putting his coffee down.

"Anyway, we never finished the challenge, did we? Skip was going to guess Douglas's... er, what do you call it - you know, whether he likes blokes or not."

"Yes," Douglas purred, "we never did. What do you say, Martin?"

Martin looked up at Douglas's mildly amused face, and at Arthur's far too eager one. He looked back at the array of switches and dials on the flight deck in front of him, which somehow managed to be less baffling than the array of potential sexual identities that Douglas might possess. "I don't know!" he yelped. "I really don't know. I did some research, and now I don't know _mine_ anymore!" He turned, pointing a shaking finger at Douglas. "And I don't even think _you_ know, really!" He folded his arms, looking down at them in a sulk. Douglas would have some flip answer that would put him in his place, and he would owe a forfeit - but more importantly, he had _lost_. He had tried his best, and had come up empty-handed.

"I say, skip..." Arthur sounded deflated.

"Well _done_ ," Martin." Martin looked up. Douglas's tone was unexpectedly empty of mockery. "You're completely right," he continued.

"I am?" Martin asked, baffled.

"Yes, absolutely. I've had all kinds of answers given to me from my various co-pilots at British Airways, and none of them ever really fit."

"Oh." Martin looked up, blinking. He had been _right_?

"You won!" Arthur broke out into a broad grin. "Oh, well done! He gets a prize, then, doesn't he?"

Douglas's eyes practically glittered as he unstrapped himself from his seat. "You know, I think he does."

Douglas's lips were unexpectedly soft, Martin noted, and his acid tongue startlingly gentle. While the Douglas's prize did not enlighten Martin any farther in terms of his _own_ sexual identity, Martin had to admit that it was rather enjoyable.


End file.
